*Warning: In this post, I sound like I'm trying too hard to write like a sports writer. It might get a little annoying. Just warning you.
It's a strange thing what happens to a man during his twenties. When he begins the decade, he is young, spirited, and stupid. As he grows into his mid-twenties, some of that stupidity is replaced with intelligence, owing mostly to the attendance of college or steady employment. The youth and the sprit, on the other hand, don't begin to fade until his late twenties. It is then that a portion of that youth and spirit are replaced with a greater sense of purpose and responsibility. Some of the intelligence is replaced with a few sprouting seeds of wisdom, too. In a lighter sense, the twenties are ten years long because that's how long it takes a man to stop acting like a teenager. Think of it as nature's highly flawed male rehabilitation program. So as I inch closer (17 months) to the end of my 20s, and as the end of the decade approaches, I can't help but reflect on my evolution as a sports fan in the last ten years. My recollection was helped in part by ESPN's Page 2, whose satirical stance is often superimposed with a more reflective, Seahawks-eye-view on sports. Their recent feature on the
25 Greatest Games of the Decade made me think about what has happened to sports as I once knew it. Admittedly, my thoughts on this subject have been reinforced by Matt Taibbi's brash
piece last month in my favorite magazine,
Men's Journal.
In my early twenties I soaked up episodes of SportsCenter as if it were a Soap Opera. I was amazed at the creativity of the Anchors, the inside look from the Reporters, and the dynamic interface from the Booth. And now when I watch the same show, it looks less like something centered on sports and more like an infomercial. Every segment is sponsored by some leech of a corporation, surviving off the testosterone and masculinity of ESPN's viewers. To put it simply, I'm over SportsCenter, and apparently SportsCenter is over me. I'm no longer part of it's 18-24-year-old-male target audience. In some sense, ESPN has already tagged me and bagged me, and now my stuffed head rests above its mantle.
As I leafed through Page 2's piece, the game that struck me as the apex of pure and commercialized sport was the
2005 Fiesta Bowl between Boise State and Oklahoma. You remember, right? The early lead. The blown lead. The comeback. Overtime. The Statue of Liberty. The proposal. In fact, Page 2's picture of this game was not of Jared Zabransky hiding the pigskin behind his hip, or Coach Chris Peterson being doused with smurf-blue Gatorade, but of Ian Johnson proposing to his smurf-turfed cheerleader/girlfriend. It was pure sports bliss, until Meyers,
if you remember, actually cued up the runningback to perform the proposal. At the end of their interview, Meyers said to Johnson "I know you're gonna propose to your girlfriend..." at which point, the runningback took the metaphorical handoff from his new quarterback and delivered the engagement ring into the endzone, as it were. The moment was still magic, but it lost some luster along the way. It wasn't natural anymore. It was made-up. Not necessarily the end of sports as a purely athletic venture, but the beginning of the end.
Since that moment, I've become jaded as a sports fan. Kind of like that scene in the Davinci code when Tom Hanks and his mademoiselle found out what really goes on in those Templar meetings. I can't watch it without thinking that only a small percentage of the three hour telecast will be spent on the game itself. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, televised sports has for years echoed corporate sentiments just as loud as athletic ones. An elated Joe Montana never spontaneously told the camera that he was "going to Disneyland" after winning multiple Super Bowls in the 1980s. Some two-bit production assistant wearing Mouse Ears told him to. What depresses me is that televised sports will never be the same purely athletic endeavor that it was of my youth. Nowadays I'd prefer camping or mountain biking to watching mainstream sports on TV. Even an episode of Jersey Shore seems more authentic when you compare it with your average contrived NFL pre-game show.
So, am I just becoming a curmudgeon, or is there some truth to what I have to say? I obviously can't answer that question for myself. Maybe I should ask Adidas pitchman
Kevin Garnett.
